Category: Islands

I'd really like to read this book, "The Crofter and the Laird," by John McPhee, as my own heritage in the Scottish Hebrides is similar to McPhee's. We are both descended from ancient Celtic tribes that inhabited that region. In the late 1960s, he had the opportunity to spend a summer in his ancestral homeland... Continue Reading →

Click for History Channel Series, "The Vikings" On my recent trip to Scotland, I learned that I likely have Viking heritage, since the Vikings, or Norsemen, Danes, and Swedes, migrated to or invaded the Inner Hebrides islands and Ulster in northern Ireland, establishing the kingdom of Dal Riata around 500 A.D. One of my distant... Continue Reading →

The journey by land from the Isle of Jura in the Southern Hebrides to Ayr, Scotland on the Western mainland was a long one, nearly 11 hours. If we could have booked a flight on a 20-seater puddle-jumper, just a 20-minute leap over to Glasgow, we could have saved a day of travel. Alas,... Continue Reading →

"In the Fifteenth Century much of the Scottish western islands called the Inner He, rides were controlled by the Clan Donald. The supreme ruler was the Lord of the Isles. So powerful was the clan that the King of Scotland could not exercise authority in their lands.... "The inhabitants of Jura during the lordship of... Continue Reading →

In our summer travels, my wife and I kept running into the literary legacy of George Orwell, the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair. In Barcelona, we learned that in the 1930s, he covered the Spanish civil war and wrote a book, Homage to Catalonia. In the 1940s, he published the classics, Animal Farm, and 1984,... Continue Reading →

"Extremely unget-at-able" was how the writer George Orwell described passage to the Isle of Jura in the 1940s. Nowadays there are daily 20-minute flights by eight-seater puddle jumpers from Glasgow to the island of Islay, where you rent a car and take a 15-minute ferry over to Jura. My siblings and I took a more... Continue Reading →

View from Ardlussa's front yard. The Ardlussa Estate was purchased from the Clan Campbell in 1926 by the grandfather of the current laird, Andrew Fletcher, for a bargain basement price. The Clan Campbell had owned the farms of Jura for more than 400 years, since 1506, when the Scottish king removed the Clan MacDonald as... Continue Reading →

Alastair McIntyre of Electronic Scotland, a site for the "Scottish Diaspora," has posted a history of the Scots from time immemorial. Plot summary for those who don't like to read a lot online: Celtic ancestors walked from probably Africa to India to Asia Minor (Turkey), migrated to Southern and Central Europe, mixed with French, sailed over to... Continue Reading →